SPEYER: I relinquish my literary solitude to you, because something has become very clear to me in the last few days: I need to be challenged by you, my dear Dr. Benjamin, to take a stand.
BENJAMIN: What do you mean, “take a stand”?
SPEYER: I’ll explain in a moment, and in so doing, we will have arrived at the difficulties concerning my third act. Writing my last act is not so much a technical problem as a moral one.
BENJAMIN: You’ll have to address this moral problem in dialogue on stage. As in life, a problem is best conceptualized through conversation, for which I stand at the ready.
SPEYER: Once again I’ve seen that nothing is easier than writing the opening acts. The hand just flies over the paper, as it’s all about creating expectations. And creating expectations that you cannot later fulfill? That has a name: literary swindle. You know, the whole problem with drama comes down to an issue of credit. In the first two acts you can write out an almost unlimited number of promissory notes.
BENJAMIN: Until, in the third act, the audience comes to cash them in.
SPEYER: Mark Twain illustrated this very nicely. He began one of his stories with the most outrageous characters and events. At breakneck speed, twists are piled on twists, leaving the impression that the author cannot possibly extricate himself from his own ideas. The reader’s heart races in anticipation of how all these tensions will be resolved, how this tangled web will ever be unraveled. But then, right in the thick of it, Mark Twain suddenly breaks off: “I’ve lost my way in this story of mine,” and leaves the reader adrift with the characters.
BENJAMIN: Hmm. That’s an example and at the same time no example at all. For the imbroglio in the last act is perhaps not so much about resolving the plot as, in doing so, showing the author’s true colors. With a writer of tragedy, after a few scenes it will usually be clear what he thinks of his hero and the other characters. For the author of today’s social comedies, it’s an altogether different matter. He can, and perhaps must, maintain a certain air of neutrality. He should not throw himself at his heroes. He should let them quietly be. But at the end the audience will certainly demand that the man — that is, the author — make his own opinion known while refraining, as far as possible, from putting the words directly in the mouth of one of his characters.
SPEYER: This is precisely my difficulty. You get the picture. We have a man and two women, the famous triangle in the social comedy. This man marries the girl he loves. But he can’t break away from his previous lover: whether due to sensual attachment, sympathy, or human solidarity. His wife accepts this lover as part and parcel of the marriage, as she believes that there can be no moral obstacle for three people if the people involved are of strictly noble convictions, and we are certainly dealing here with three fair and levelheaded people.
BENJAMIN: But that is precisely the crux of your social comedy, to see how far modern people get with their vaunted sporting fairness.
SPEYER: Of course. We have two ladies and one gentleman, in the best sense of these words. But it emerges: in such a situation ordinary people would say, “My dear man, you have just married; you must give up the lover from your bachelor years.” But that’s not brave enough or fair enough for our people. It turns out, of course, that marriage is not a sport and that fairness has no place in the human proto-relationship. In fact, instead of simplifying things, it complicates them to a degree that was previously unimaginable for our three people. As time goes on, one of the women obviously has to go. The casualty is of course the lover.
BENJAMIN: That would still be much too easy. Now, to show myself as a critic of a somewhat more pleasant nature, I would like to draw your attention to something beautiful and important in your play, something that is worth considering: you say that the man married the woman he loves. As is proper. But the reason he hangs onto the other woman, with whom he had been together for years, has absolutely nothing to do with devotion. He loves this other one too. Only he loves her with a vague and somewhat extravagant love that conforms to his concepts of chivalry and fairness. Our hero is actually a man living in two eras: sometimes as troubadour and knight, and other times as a citizen of today’s Berlin.
SPEYER: Now we’re left to come to the right decision for the last act: how to proceed with the third woman. There are many possible resolutions. Even Goethe once allowed himself to coolly juxtapose two final scenarios in examining a very similar subject, with his Stella.4 In the first and lovelier version the hero pulls to his chest both his beloveds: his spouse and his mistress.
STELLA (embracing him): May I?—
CECELIA: Are you grateful that I kept you from fleeing?
STELLA (embracing her): Oh you!—
FERNANDO (embracing both): Mine! Mine!
STELLA (seizing his hand, dialogue1 on him): I am yours!
CECELIA (seizing his hand, embracing him): We are yours!
In the second version, Fernando shoots himself and Stella takes poison.
BENJAMIN: And you’ve managed to squeeze as many as three different resolutions out of me:
The elegiac, in which Marie — our Stella is called Marie — departs, waving;
The cynical, as in “Let’s try it all again and somehow it will work”;
The heroic, as in the first Stella version.
SPEYER: You don’t yet know my fourth, which I came up with last night. I’m a little anxious about what you’ll say, because in this case I’ve disregarded our underlying plan. You were never in agreement that we should simply find a second man for our poor Marie to fall in love with.
BENJAMIN: That doesn’t worry me too much. The underlying plan is there so that it can be breached at times.
SPEYER: But I didn’t go about it so lightly. As a matter of fact, last night I made a peculiar discovery. I’d like to apply to poetry Bismarck’s principle of occasional candor in diplomacy. You know of the immense impact Bismarck sometimes achieved in ruthlessly deploying Machiavellian plans when his interests required it. In my case, the spectators have gone into the intermission after the second act thinking: “How will the author get himself out of these difficulties?” So I will show them. I will transpose the difficulties, which plague me in my work, into my work itself.
BENJAMIN: So your heroes are to become drama writers of a sort?
SPEYER: That’s right. I’m making them into colleagues, as I can’t seem to manage with just you.
BENJAMIN: I will most likely find these colleagues more pleasant than my previous one.
SPEYER: I hope I have done all I could to make them pleasing to you. Here’s my draft from last night:
Sitting together we have our two women, Luisa and Marie, along with their man, Golo, who is loved by them both, and finally the new man, the fourth, whom you will meet here for the first time, a man by the name of Walter. Marie says:…
[Here, the manuscript breaks off.]5
BENJAMIN: So, you have made a moral decision, but I don’t know whether you will be satisfied with my interpretation. Do you know why you were able to bring in a new man in the last act?
SPEYER: Hmm.
BENJAMIN: If it were an important character, this fourth one, it would be a flagrant technical violation to introduce him at the last minute. But do you want to hear what he actually is? He’s nothing at all. He’s the first available man. And perhaps that will be your moral position, that our friend Marie consoles herself with the first available man. That marriage today is frequently not all that important, at least relatively speaking; but that the things that tend to rattle, complicate, or call it into question are not more important than the marriage itself.